Since I wrote my post about the morality of war games, and game themes more generally, I got lots of interesting responses with people’s perspectives about why the like certain games with problematic themes or other games they won’t play. I also came across a number of very interesting pieces on the topic, the most interesting of which by far was this one about a book by Peter Gray on the way playing games helps the development of kids. Drawing on lessons from kids playing in the Ghettos during the Holocaust, Gray says this about violent games with controversial themes:

Some people fear that violent play creates violent adults, but in reality the opposite is true. Violence in the adult world leads children, quite properly, to play at violence… It is wrong to think that somehow we can reform the world for the future by controlling children's play and controlling what they learn. If we want to reform the world, we have to reform the world; children will follow suit.

This seems a little overstated, as I can imagine violent play getting out of hand and starting to shape reality. But there’s certainly truth in it and it’s hard to argue with it in the context. There were other interesting pieces, such as this piece which offers some serious criticisms of the popular game Cards Against Humanity or this one trying to give advice to prospective designers who are considering controversial themes for their games. But the most interesting one was an interview with famed designer Bruno Faidutti on the most excellent podcast Ludology. They decided to interview him following his article “Post-colonial Catan” which I cited in my post. I enjoyed the article and I’m a big fan of Faidutti’s designs in general. Which is why I was disappointed to disagree with most of what he said in the interview. I started writing a comment about it in the forums but it became so long that I decided to make it into a blog post. I'll start with what I agree with - near the end of the episode Faidutti says he wants to see greater diversity of designers - more women, more black people, more young people and in general more variety. I couldn't agree more. This is a general issue that has special importance when it comes to artistic and cultural creation. I also agree that it's a good idea for designers to have a more conscious vision of their themes and reflect about the social message of their games. Given this agreement, I don't quite understand why Faidutti says that he doesn’t wants designers to do anything differently, but he is spot on in saying that there is a paucity of analysis and reflection on board games and that board games don't get the attention they deserve compared to other art/cultural forms. When I started my blog, that was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind - to do political analysis of games that takes them a bit more seriously than they are taken in mainstream media. I wanted to do it from the perspective of a gamer who loves games so that they would be treated with the love and seriousness that we usually treat them when we talk about the endlessly on BGG forums, but also thinks about what they mean as meaningful cultural creations. I haven't done much on this front thus far and I'm not sure I'm the right person to do that, but hey – at least I’m trying.

Which is why I was disappointed that Faidutti decided to start the interview by repeatedly saying people shouldn't take his piece so seriously, that it started as a joke and even though he thinks it raises interesting issues, we shouldn't take them very seriously. I always find that kind of response surprising, as he obviously spent a lot of time and effort writing the piece, but it seems to me that he was mostly trying to calm things down, having received angry responses of people who thought his post aims to censor their board games, or that the such posts would lead us to a boring world of politically correct gaming where all the fun has been squeezed out of everything.

Faidutti is right to think these reactions are misguided, but it's not because his analysis shouldn't be taken seriously or because it means that we shouldn't do anything differently. They are misguided because we can have serious discussions and even disagreements about serious things without losing our senses. Or, at least, so I hope. More to the point, in this specific case the anger is completely misguided - as I wrote at greater length earlier, criticizing something doesn't mean we want to censor it. The point of discussions of this sort is to persuade - and make changes to the norms we already have. You can always go against the norm though obviously that’s not easy. When I discuss these things, my goal is to convince people (or be convinced - there are often things I haven't thought about), and if I'm successful the change will come not because there will be censorship of games, but because people's attitudes will change. For example, in his comment about this podcast Isaach Shalev mentions the way the characters in Coup and The Resistance are racially diverse, and there is equal representation of women in a way that is not demeaning. That is, sadly, not the standard in our hobby. I say sadly because I am saddened by it. I'm perfectly aware that there are people who don't care, and I think it's totally their prerogative. I hope to convince them to care because right now the state of affairs is that there are many great games that I really love, like Mage Wars, that has art on them that I find problematic. Mage Wars is a game I really really love – it’s one of my favorites. And it's not half as bad as a bunch of other games but still, that's a turn off for me - I hate seeing female characters sexualized for no apparent reason, going into battle with unwearable armor which emphasizes their body. Not because I mind nudity - I am very liberal in the art that I consume - but because it bothers me that the same game has the men wearing combat gear while the women wearing shiny metal bras or almost nothing. It's also troubling because of the way it relates to the history and context of troubling depictions of women. And I guess I could say, that on some level, it offends me a little (and I’m not the only one). To me, it's just bad taste - I feel like we could, and should, do better than enhance these stereotypes and when I see game that's so innovative, so smart, so full of love - a gigantic amount of time and attention was invested in it - and it couldn't be saved from these dated tropes - I cringe. In the same vein, I'm disappointed, like Niki from Board With Life, when a fabulous game like Sheriff of Nottingham has only playable female character (out of five) - even if I still would consider this game one of the best games of the year. As it happens, I often have to choose between a game that I love and art/presentation that I dislike. And I accept that that's my problem. It's not half as bad as it in other parts of our culture (as in video games), and it usually won't stop me from getting the game. Yet I think it’s a problem, mainly because of the way it makes gaming less hospitable for women and girls who would otherwise want to be a part of our hobby. It’s an issue we should not just be aware of, as Faidutti says, but also do something about. And we can - if enough people were bothered by it, the market dimensions would change. Naked sexualized warrior-women (or very few, if at all, playable women) would no longer be the default in gaming (I think we can see this change taking place, though very slowly). Of course, they would still be out there for those who really want them - so no censorship involved - but the default would be to challenge ourselves and break new grounds on this front. The same goes to all those issue that Faidutti mentions - from racial diversity to perspectives about colonialism and other forms of exoticism. True, it would be great if there was more variety in the realm of designers. But bald white men, such as Faidutti and myself, can still challenge ourselves to think out of the box and do better on this (on our own standards - so no imposed standards of censorship). The second point of disagreement is about board games as vehicles for meaningful content. Faidutti insists in a variety of points that board games can really only have very simplistic content because they are more like pictures than novels and you only have very few elements. With so few elements, he says, you can’t delve very deeply into anything. This is what Faidutti calls the 'technical' reason why there are simplistic themes in board games (as opposed to the ideological reason that is related to the aforementioned fact that most game designers are old white men). The technical reason seems completely false to me so I wanted to say something about it. Faidutti says that "board games are simple, short rules, always a bit abstract" (16:56). Because we are abstracting from specifics and only have a few rules, we can’t say much and what's more important - we can't say anything serious. I think that's obviously false. Some of the most evocative and expressive art forms involve very few elements. Poetry is one of the most obvious examples but there is a variety of other examples, including Hemingway's short short story. But it's also obviously false about games. We just mentioned Coup, a game whose original graphic design seems completely in line with boring traditional gender roles (only one female character with a passive ability) got reskinned as superbly interesting and diverse game which Shalev now rightly notes to be social commentary. In the new version of the game they realized that maybe the Duke has to stay male (though I think that's a frontier we can also smash one day), the assassin and captain don't have to, and neither does the Inquisitor - and I think that's fabulous. Likewise, Love Letter is a tiny game that has only 15 cards but as its gazillion implantations show, it offers a great variety of options. And they feel different, because getting a love letter to the princess feels differently than getting the Munchkin loot. And you won't be surprised to find out that the Batman version is not about courting Batman, though, of course, it should be.

The Inquisitor in the latest expansion to Coup. Awesomeness

Moreover, I think the claim that games are pretty abstract and not accompanied with as much story and lore as novels is pretty false. This might be a matter of style and of course there are games, like Settlers of Catan, that say very little about their own world. But so many game designers spend so much of their time on the lore, and so many games are accompanied with long pieces of fiction, whether in the rulebook (as in City of Remnants or Twilight Struggle), on the company's website (as in Summoner Wars or Terra Mystica) or as actual books that come out following the game (as in Sentinels of the Multiverse). In many of these games, there’s lots of story on the cards and you discover it through playing the game (as in Dead of Winter or Twilight Struggle). That's not every game, and I'm aware of the fact I just mentioned three games by Plaid Hat Games, who specialize in thematic games. One may say that Euro games tend to be more abstract and less specific (partially because they tend to be language independent and therefore avoid flavor text on components) and that might be true. But there is really a large swathe of games that do a lot more than the bear bone abstract theme that Faidutti talks about (which, as I said, is not free of content even if it's minimal). The recent (and fabulous) Dogs of War from Paolo Mori is an example of that - a brilliant worker placement game that's very Euro-ish in style yet more than half of its rulebook is a very elaborate fictional account of the world the game is set in. I really like Dogs of War - it's a unique and interesting hybrid - but I personally think the fiction in the rulebook is not very good. The game is still mechanically brilliant and very enjoyable, but I think that if it had better fiction with less hackneyed clichés and more character development - the game would have been much more interesting (also, Niki from Board With Life reminds us that this is another excellent game she loves that only has one playable female character). I think that good games make good stories; very few of us play just the mechanics without caring about the theme. Last point on this is that even when the theme is historical or founded in an existing fiction (such as Lord of the Rings) and the game theme is very abstract and minimalist (like many Euros), the designer still makes choices about what of the content to include. Who are the playable sides in this war? What kind of feel do we want to give to this historic setting? The argument that abstract games with thin themes don't have much say is really weak, in my opinion. The third disagreement is related to the previous one and it's about the kinds of themes we want for board games. Faidutti says that games need to be fun and therefore they have to be light-hearted. In board games, we look for light settings that would make people smile. You can't have a setting that's too involved - as you would in a movie or a book - or that would spoil gaming night. Board games are not meant to make political points and when they try to do that - they are not fun. I agree that the main point of board games is not to make political statements. In fact, if you want to make a political statement, I don't think designing a board game is a great way to go about it. But that it's not the main point doesn't mean board games don't carry with them any political content. They inevitably do, as any work of art. If board games were only bare and abstract mechanics, they wouldn't be very much fun for most of us. True, the theme helps us understand and internalize the mechanics - but that can’t not the only reason we have themes for board games. And it's not the case that we want light themes for game night if we are to have fun. I actually think the opposite is true for most games - we want things that matter and raise the stakes, or we would feel like we're playing kids games. That's one of the reasons, I think, we play war games - we want to feel like the stakes are really high. In other cases we want to lower the stakes and not take what we're doing too seriously, which is why the second edition of Cash and Guns make the art more cartoonish. I think they made the right choice - when we're pointing foam guns at each other, some may feel like realistic art might be too much. Different people will have different threshold, but it's just not true that most of our games are in light-hearted settings that make us smile. Does the Cathulu world make you smile? Does the Star World universe? It's also not true that we can't have fun when the theme is serious or one that invites thinking deeply. At some point Faidutti compares board games to light novels, which is true for some games. But many many more of them really aren't. They are much more like a sprawling fantasy novel, a historic drama or an economic report about the development of the car industry. We have lots of fun doing serious things - we read long and dense novels for fun. Why else would we read them? We read non-fiction for fun, and argue about politics on the internet for fun. There is a great variety of things we do for fun and these are such different ‘funs’ that perhaps we shouldn’t use the same word. But we do. If you think about it, fun and serious are really not mutually exclusive. So I don't think it's enough that we are aware of the exoticism, and are making fun of them. I think Faidutti is right to be concerned about the colonists in Puerto Rico, where we white-wash these of our history (and we do so not only, and not primarily, in games). I think being aware and making fun of it, as he suggests, is definitely one way to deal with these simplifications, but it's not the only one and perhaps not even the best one (and, contra Faidutti, it certainly doesn't seem to be the case in Five Tribes where there is no trace of self-humor or even self-awareness). We can do better, as designers and gamers, if push ourselves to think a little more broadly about the themes in the games we make and play. And we can do better, as consumers, if we voice our displeasure with hackneyed stereotypes and opt for games that have unusual themes or depictions. There's only so much courage we can expect from commercial companies if we, as board gamers, don't send the message that we want gaming themes to be broader, more appealing to a wide audience, more diverse and more deeply interesting. That's my take on the matter. I don't support censorship of board games, but I think we are, for the most part, stuck in a limited world of hackneyed clichés. We can do better than that. Every year amazing games come out with innovative and brilliant mechanics that break new ground. And we see a greater variety of themes and stories. Yet we can do a lot better than Settlers of Catan on that front. Not every game needs to be a breakthrough on all fronts and I'm not saying that I won't play another game that pits orcs against humans or has me kill zombies. But in my book one of the parameters of a good games that it says something interesting. And other games? It's not that they have no message, it's just that the message they have is not very original. And that's a shame.

One of the biggest aspect of tabletop gaming is the fact that we sit with each other and interact in person. It may sound trivial but in the age of digital gaming, that's what many tabletop gamers point to when they explain what they love most about their hobby. Having that direct interaction, that physical proximity - both with the game and with each other - is a huge part of the fun.

So why is it that so many of us don't talk while we play games? I once played a whole game of Spyrium (not a long game, but still takes over an hour) where not a word was uttered. The game was terrific, fun and tense - yet I felt odd after we finished it. What kind of interaction is this if we spend the entire evening not communicating at all? (at least, not in that most direct way of using words) Are we even interacting?

Shh... No talking around the gaming table

The answer is, of course, yes - we are interacting. Even if we're not talking while we're playing, we're communicating in a variety of non-verbal ways. the obvious ones are giggling, guffawing, making faces, sighs and the like. But these are just 'cheats' - they are ways we 'talk' when we can't talk. We also, always, communicate via what we do in the game. If we are intensely engaged in a game, we will enjoy talking about it afterwards - just like we enjoy talking about a movie we watched together (and I never really could enjoy going to a movie alone, the conversation afterwards is for me the heart of the matter). And that in-game interaction is priceless, even if we don't say a word during a game (or talk about anything but the game in front of us - which is also pretty odd).

Yet I still feel like something is missing when there is no table talk. I tried to think about why that is and what I came up with has to do with the kind of games we most like to play, and that basic division between Eurogames and the so-called Amerithrash style (note: thrash, not trash).

Now I know that the distinction between Euro and Amerithrash is obsolete, and that most games today blend the styles in whichever is their most preferred way. My personal favorites are what I call Hybrid games that do exactly that (an example of one discussed below). But I think the distinction is helpful as an analytical tool. So bear with me as I make these very stylized and cartoonish definitions of these terms. These are controversial things, and I'm sure some people will disagree; but really these are not definition but more like lists of attributes (cluster concepts, as philosophers call them) - no game would have all these attributes and none of them is required in order to define a game as a 'euro'. Yet every Euro would have most relevant attributes and likewise with Amerithrash.

Eurogames are games where each player is mostly focused on building his or her own village/farm/empire the goal is to do so in the most efficient way. Typically, players can only build or change their own things and not directly interfere with (or destroy) other players' stuff. Players compete for scarce resources and resources management is therefore crucial for success. There is no player elimination, gameplay tends to be short and the games are usually very abstract, with economic, industrial, historical or pastoral themes that are not central to the game. These games tend to be language independent and have relatively little story or flavor text. They are low on luck in the sense that they avoid randomization mechanics and specifically dice. They tend to play in a given set of rounds and determine the winner by victory points (which typically come from various sources - also known as 'point salads'). Eurogamers love wooden components and dislike table talk.

Amerithrash games are long, immersive and thematic. They tend to have lots of background story, flavor text and draw in players to immerse themselves. Their traditional settings are fantasy, sci-fi and space - though historically themed war gaming is closer to this camp. They often include area control or conflict, where players can spend resources to directly destroy what other players have spend their time and effort building. They tend to include a lot of dice rolling and therefore are open to 'lucky' swings and unpredictable developments. The conflict is often accompanied by structured negotiations where players can formally form alliances (as in Dune) or the game allots specific time for negotiation (as in Diplomacy). There is often hidden information that players hide from each other (simultaneous turns is one particularly effective mechanic). Amerigamers love plastic pieces and particularly miniatures (in general, miniature and role-playing games have a lot in common with Amerithrash) and they consider table talk a huge part of the game.

We can already see that these two style of games pull us in different directions regarding table talk. And of course, these are not just style of games but they are most importantly style of gamers. Eurogamers see their games as 'decision-making contests' - a competition whose goal is to reward the best decision-maker. Because of that, table talk is frowned upon - if we are competing to see who is the best decider, pooling together information or sharing perspective gets in the way. If you point out something to another player, you are literally ruining the game - it is like giving a boost to one runner in a race. Now, of course, you might be lying or misleading but figuring out if you're lying is not one of the skills that the game aims to reward. People often lament certain cooperative games because they have a problem of 'quarterbacking' (aka as the 'Alpha gamer problem' and by the lesser known name 'Beta game problem'﻿) - where one players tells all the others what to do. The truth is, quarterbacking can happen in non cooperative games. Some people just can't keep their wisdom to themselves and really love to guide other people around a game - whether or not it also serves their own interests them in the game (though they often emphasize, perhaps unconsciously, the smart move that also serves them).

In contrast, Ameri-gamers see the heart of a game in the story players create. And that story may include strategic decisions that they made, but it's more about what they do together and to each other. Many of them see social deduction skills as part of the game - where the point is to figure out what exactly other players are hiding on the basis of your ability to 'read' them (and not on the basis of what you perceive their strategy to be as can be surmised from their in-game actions). Bluffing games are all about that, from Coup to Sheriff of Nottingham, as well as party games like Werewolf, The Resistance and Spyfall. It is also at the heart of games with a traitor mechanic or hidden goals, such as Dead of Winter, Battlestar Galactica and Shadows Over Camelot. And they play a huge role in traditional area control games from Risk to Diplomacy, from Dune to Game of Thrones. In any of those games (and many like them), misleading and manipulating the other players is the pretty much the point of the game, so it feels very natural to allow any kind of table talk. If you point out something to someone, you are probably doing this to direct his attention away from harming you. These games often depend on the players for balance - if they don't 'bash the leader', as the saying goes, these games would be no fun.

One interesting caveat is the idea of trading. Settlers of Catan, the almost paradigmatic Eurogame, thrived exactly because it diverged from the hard Euro line be adding the trading component. Trading makes games less about the competition of strategic decision-making and more about social deduction - you have to persuade people and understand what they value. It opens up space for negotiation and 'irrational' players might ruin the calculation of a strategic player. Though it's not as confrontational as lying or betraying and players can only make positive offers to each other - they can't really threaten each other because there's no way you can harm someone. Sure, you can threaten never to trade with someone but that's typically not a credible threat and even if it is - it's more like 'I'm not playing with you ever again' than 'if you attack me here, I'll have to retaliate over there.'

That means that the extent and kind of acceptable table talk depends on the game you're playing as well as the style of gaming you and your group likes. But what about the new wave of hybrid games that mesh up these game style? They are faced with a conundrum. Some of them have rules that encourage opposite tendencies and you can sometimes see the designer struggling with the game's identity. A striking example is in the wonderful, and decidedly hybrid, Wars of the Roses: Lancaster vs. York, which I love to bits though it might just be one of those games that try to please everybody and ends up making everyone unhappy. It's an area majority game based on card drafting, reminiscent of the classic Euro El-Grande, but you can aggressively kick people out of castles. Yet the battles have no randomization - they are strictly 'deterministic', where commitment of troops is done through simultaneous action selection. And alliances are kind of forced on you, since every two players have joint interests in parliament votes. But, the winner is not the one who destroys most troops or controls the board at the end of the game. Instead, the winner is the player with most victory points at the end of five rounds, and those points are awarded in a 'point salad' system.

Wars of the Roses has some of the most gorgeous components in the business

In my experience with the game, it truly lends itself to lots of negotiation and table talk. First, simultaneous action selection is always an invitation for promises, threats and backstabbing. The entire game of Diplomacy, famous for its backstabbing cruelty and its ability to ruin friendships, has only one mechanic: simultaneous action selection. You can make promises but the other player can't wait to see what you do before he does his part, and that creates a great temptation to break (and therefore make) promises. Second, the alliance aspect makes it almost impossible not to have discussions with your partner. The possibility of redundant attacks or needless in-fighting really encourages coordination. But allies also have their own distinct interests, so such coordination is never full-proof: in fact, the game provides you with almost as much of an incentive to promise and then betray your ally as it does for your enemy. Lastly, it's an area control war game. You can really harm someone, if you feel like it, and they know it. So they are bound to try and offer you stuff so that you won't. Trying to abolish table talk in such a game seems almost silly. Yet the designer chose to add the following curious note to the game:

Note: Specific strategic and tactical discussions between players are not allowed. For example, “Blue is winning, so you attack him in London and I will get him out of York”. This is particularly important in the 4 player game where players are allied. (p. 6 of the rulebook)

I read this and I thought - really? Needless to say, in my group we have ignored this rule because that's not how we want to play the game. Yet I think this just shows how the designer struggled with designing a game that's all about strategic decisions made under conditions of uncertainty (where you have to guess your opponent's move by inferring it from their strategy) and a game that's all about backstabbing, alliances and social deduction. My friend thought it was silly to even write a note like this in the rulebook but I disagree: as the designer, you can definitely include rules about what kind of information players can share. The new hotness, a Polish game called Mysterium, is an entire game centered around one player who cannot speak to other players. It's similar to time restrictions on negotiation phases or the requirement that certain information (like your hand of cards) be kept secret. Yet a game has inner tension if the designer wants you to keep something to yourself while the other mechanics of the game strongly encourage you not to. That's the case with cooperative games that try to just tell you to keep your hand of cards secret without giving you an in-game reason to do that. Many people ignore that rule, and rightly so, because it doesn't feel like it makes sense. The no-discussion rule in Wars of the Roses feels that way to me.1

Yet I see the problem - so much relies on what kind of strategy you're going for that discussing tactics might just reveal what players should work hard to discover themselves. I guess there isn't really a good way to restrict one kind of discussion while permitting the other, so for me this game comes a package with lots of table talk, distractions, misdirection and of course - backstabbing.

To sum, if want to have fun with your friends while you're playing games, it's a good to have everybody on the same page regarding what they enjoy when they play the game. If you really want the game to be a competition of strategic decision-making, it's really best to talk about something else during the game. Many gamers feel responsibility for the games they introduce and teach people. They want these people to enjoy the games, and one way to enjoy a game is to win. So gamers often help their friends with strategy on their first games or just quarterback in general. I suggest that you remind yourself that making poor decisions is also fun - if they are your decisions and if you learn from them. After all, we wouldn't enjoy the game if there was a clearly superior choice to make at any point. If you, like me, have the tendency to do that - remind yourself that it is their game to play and their mistakes to make. Trust the game to ensure that they enjoy it. You liked it, hopefully they will too. If we do this well, we would have fewer comments in rulebooks about discussions and more fun at the table with our friends.

This week's recommendation: Keith Burgen started a new youtube channel where he discusses his game design ideas in 3 minute segments. He's a controversial guy when it comes to games, but his stuff is pretty brilliant and definitely worth a read. I really recommend his episode about depth and elegance in game design. 1 One caveat for my discussion of Wars of the Roses is that it might be the case with the game - and I haven't played it enough times to figure it out - that table talk does actually ruin the game. This would be true if the game presented many cases where negotiations would be without tension because it would be clear what players should do if they could only talk about it. A type of such cases is what game theorists call 'coordination problem' - an example would be where there are two towns we need to conquer, neither of us cares which one we occupy but it's crucial for both of us that we don't both go for the same one. This situation is quite possible in this game, as allies share interest in their joint domination of a region. Yet they each have an interest in their own domination over their ally, and different towns have different values, so the problem is rarely one of pure coordination. If this happens a lot in the game (I haven't played enough to find out) than table talk can indeed ruin a lot of the fun. If this is the case, I would argue that the game has some serious design issues that should have been dealt with in the playtesting phase. May be it is a beta game. The game would then be ruined not by table talk but by the inner tensions of its design. I truly hope that this is not the case because so far, I'm really loving this game.